Absolutely. If you’re in college, an internship is ideal.
And yet, the number of times I had to talk a manager off a ledge about an internship candidate without relevant experience…
This after they’d been through 2-3 rounds of coding challenges and a “culture fit” check.
So put something on your resume. Maybe you were a “support tech in a Linux server environment” for 3 years because you helped your grandparent with a router a few times. We weren’t calling references. And your coworkers will know and expect you are green.
I think it’s easy for them to fall into a trap where they artificially inflate the requirements just because there is interest in the position.
So in a sense, yes, they’ve lost touch.
They also forget that every year, the “best” interviewees use them as a practice round and leverage for a more prestigious company. Inevitably, they chase unicorns at the expense of everything else. Every year, 3 colleges, hundreds of hours of interview rounds for 10-15 positions and they’d end up with 3-5 that actually started the paid internship.